Bringing a new standard to socks with SMCo Ecommerce Site
Standard Merchandising, Co (SMCo) is a 100 year old company that has been selling socks wholesale and also a factory to makes socks for other retailers. For this project, I worked with a small team of VP of product, director of digital, creative director, copywriter, and social media person.
The site is designed over a Magento/Bootstrap framework to enhance the eCommerce experience. It is created with Sketch and prototyped through Invision app. This project also gave me the opportunity to code many of the CSS pattern and library through Codepen before handing off to the developers.
There are a total of 7 brands to design, each with its own unique look and feel for its various markets and includes the wholesale ecommerce site.
The old website is non-responsive and looks outdated so I was tasked to bring not only the main marketing site up-to-date but all its sub brands, which had all the same look.
I joined the team as the logo was finalized by another designer and wireframes had already been completed previously. My main task thus was to create a pleasing UI that fits the story of each brand. I worked with a small team consisting of VP of eCommerce, Digital Marketing Director, Art Director, copywriter, and a junior designer who I oversaw.
There are a total of eight brands that I had to create to match the logo. This includes selecting typography, setting type scale, color selection, and creating icons for each of the brands. Selecting type was limited to system font, Google font, or Adobe Typekit. As the site used the same backend, each of the icons were mainly the same set of SVG files with variation in colors and border weight.
The brands include: SMCo (marketing and wholesale site), B.ella, Red Lion, Alchester and Sons, QT, Nouvella, E.G. Smith, and Wright Avenue. Each brand is rolled out throughout the year.
SMCo marketing site
SMCo branding had to also work for its wholesale shop. This site is meant to evoke eco-friendly, made in America appeal to the overall American population.
B.ella – luxury socks for women
B.ella sought to reach out to the established career women with a sense of style.
Red Lion – athletic socks for all
Red Lion’s aim was for all people who are into sports, whether it’s school, varsity, or professional or for parents with kids who are athletically inclined.
Alchester & Sons – luxury socks for men
Alchester and Sons aspires to the distinguished men.
At the start of the project, much of the user flow and wireframes were already worked out. With my expertise in eCommerce, I helped re-design the eCommerce flow. Originally, the checkout process was 5 step and I worked it down to 3 to make it simpler to users to buy.
With the wireframes redone and the style tiles approved, I worked with the creative director to create layouts that would best fit the visual graphics for the brand.
Email Template Designs
For the final touch to the Standard Merchandising Co’s site launch, I worked on designing email templates that worked on Campaign Monitor. I also developed the responsive coding that could be easily updated by an experienced email content producer. Each design is made on Sketch and hand coded to work on all browser, which was tested via Campaign Monitor system and by sending it to various email systems for extensive QA.
Along with marketing emails, I also worked on standard emails for new orders.
